Scripting News for 3/11/2006

Chicago Tribune: “It’s easy to track America’s covert operatives, all you need to know is how to navigate the Internet.” 

Nik Cubrilovic reviews Dabble DB. One of the most significant demos at Under the Radar. FileMaker for 2006, running as an AJAX web app. What Office Live should have been.  

Marc Canter had BBQ in Austin and found a new anthem. I’m with him, I’m providing tools for people who eat BBQ, pay taxes, educate the next generation of kids, elect Congress and the President, and decide if the rest of us can live the way we want to. If we want to stay free we have to learn how to listen. 

March 2006 tech conference season 

If you see Hugh Forrest at SXSW tell him I say hi, and I’d love to meet him someday, and I offer my services for SXSW 2007, as I do every year. Maybe one of these years they’d be willing to let me talk with their community on stage, because it’s the same community, Hugh. Why don’t we cut the distance and go direct. Who’s telling you I can’t speak from the SXSW stage. I can’t figure it out.

I was talking with Mike Arrington yesterday about Microsoft’s upcoming web conference, Mix 06. The same people who spoke at Etech are speaking there, as at SXSW, even though the Microsoft people told me straight out that it was going to be Microsoft people talking to developers (which made me think it was not a conference I wanted to go to). Then last week I found out that lots of people I know who don’t work at Microsoft are speaking there, and to my surprise, that includes Mike. (He says he assumed I was part of the program.)

I felt so wronged, why do they lie about these things, don’t they know eventually they’ll get caught in the lies, or don’t they care. (BTW, that includes Scoble too, I asked why he didn’t give me a heads up, and the answer was unsatisfying.)

I did a lot of work for them for free. That’s finished, not going to be doing any more of that. So embarassing.

I heard it’s happening at Esther’s too, which this year is focused on the Attention Economy, and the guy who drove this idea to the point where Esther does a whole conference about it, Steve Gillmor, isn’t speaking and doesn’t even get a free pass, even though he works for the company that’s putting on the conference. Now that’s something. Now I see things a bit more clearly, it looks like Esther wants us to think these are her ideas, and how inconvenient it would be to have the person whose ideas they really are, there, in the flesh, explaining how the stuff really works as she and her friends scratch the surface. I’m paying the $5000 to go to this conference, so I’m a customer, and I feel cheated. The real guy was willing to come educate us, for free, and the conference promoter said no. Yow. Maybe this should be the first question that gets answered as the show opens tomorrow afternoon. Why?

The way Esther does Steve, that’s how O’Reilly conferences cover my work. They get someone who reads my blog to talk about what I do, without mentioning me, with cheap personal shots thrown in, ones that are safe from rebuttal because the guy they’re criticizing isn’t there.

And now Microsoft is doing it too. What’s in it for them, I can’t figure out. What about Bill Gates, who’s giving the keynote, being interviewed by the Man himself, Tim O’Reilly. I’ve never known Gates to be unkind at an intellectual level to the people whose ideas he steals. He doesn’t pay them very much, if anything at all (they never offered to pay me for the work of mine they’ve used over the years). I don’t mind that so much, because that’s the way it’s always worked. It’s this new notion that you don’t need to tell people where your ideas come from. That’s not only bad business, it’s dishonest. Why the richest guy in the world needs to be so dishonest, well he doesn’t, so I don’t believe he is. He might try asking Tim O’Reilly some questions about where he gets his ideas from, when he’s on stage with him at Mix 06. I won’t be there to ask the questions, nor will any of my friends.